A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535838252

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The Man–Moth

Elizabeth Bishop

1946

Introduction

Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Man-Moth was written very early in the poet's life, just as she had graduated from college. It is a poem unlike the rest of Bishop's work in that it leans toward the surreal. The abstract images in this poem leave The Man-Moth open to a diverse range of interpretations. Indeed, the poem may be read as a meditation on the interplay between light and dark. It has also been suggested that the poet's destructive bouts with alcoholism might have influenced the poem, as the image of the Man-Moth going backward on a too fast train is an experience that the poem associates with poison. Another interpretation, based on the significance of the Man-Moth's attempts to reach the moon, suggests that the poet is attempting to express her spirituality.

Furthermore, it is this quality of open interpretation that has helped the poem endure over the decades, appealing to readers in much the same way today as it did when it was first published. Many literary critics refer to The Man-Moth as one of the best poems Bishop ever wrote. Notably, the poem was inspired by a typo in a news article in the New York Times, in which the word manmoth was used instead of the correct term: mammoth.

Bishop wrote The Man-Moth in 1935, when she was twenty-four years old. The poem was first published in 1946 in Bishop's first collection, North and South. More recently, the poem was published in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1999.

Author Biography

Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father, William Thomas Bishop, who was a building contractor, oversaw the construction of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library. He died, however, when Bishop was only eight months old. His sudden and early death caused Bishop's mother, Gertrude Bulmer, to suffer severe depression. Gertrude was institutionalized several times, and when Bishop was five years old, her mother was permanently committed to a mental hospital. Bishop never saw her again.

For the next two years Bishop lived with either her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada, or with her paternal grandparents in Massachusetts. When she was seven, Bishop suffered from a list of ailments, which included asthma.